Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

All the worst aspects of
grindhouse sludge appear in Mardi Gras
Massacre, a sexed-up horror picture with so much nasty gore that it
received an X-rating during its original release. We’re talking closeups of
women’s torsos getting sliced open so their hearts can be yanked out. Telling
the story of a psychopath luring New Orleans prostitutes back to his lair so he
can sacrifice them in weird rituals—maybe it’s Satanism or maybe it’s voodoo,
but the end result is the same—Mardi Gras
Massacre offers crappy filmmaking, exploitive nude scenes, and rotten
acting. Worse, it drags on for nearly 100 minutes thanks to slow pacing and the
presence of two long interludes: a documentary-style sequence featuring
on-the-street footage of Carnival celebrations, and a dance number. More
specifically, a disco dance number. Because, you see, instead of proper local
flavor for a picture set and shot in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre is driven by a soundtrack of thumping, upbeat
disco numbers, and at one point the picture stops dead so leading lady Gwen
Arment can swirl and twist her way through several minutes of generic
gyrations. As can be said of so many other bad movies made for the grindhouse
circuit, Mardi Grass Massacre has
nowhere to go and isn’t in any hurry to get there. The plot, such as it is,
concerns a detective (Curt Dawson) and his hooker girlfriend (Arment) getting
mired in the search for a dude preying on the Big Easy’s working girls. From
start to finish, this is a reprehensibly bad film, so it’s only of interest
for the most masochistic viewers. That said, scuzz-cinema freaks may dig some
weird elements, including the opening scene, during which the killer solicits
his first victim by searching for the “most evil” prostitute in New Orleans.
Also worth mentioning is the occasionally disquieting score, a bizarre mixture
of bouncy dance tunes and creepy electronic noises.